The Robertson Panel: The History and Legacy of the Secret Government Committee that Investigated UFO Sightings in America by Charles River Editors

Author:Charles River Editors
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Charles River Editors
Published: 2020-09-06T22:00:00+00:00

The Findings

The brevity of the group’s tenure and the scant body of study material were at once suspect as to the panel’s true purpose. The itemized conclusions comprised a litany of pedestrian explanations for both those cases studied and those left untouched. The Panel estimated that 90% of the sightings could be “readily identified”[31] as being based on meteorological, astronomical, or natural phenomena. With little specificity, it was claimed that the remaining 11% could almost certainly be explained with prolonged study which the panel was not at leisure to perform. The fault in every case that came before Robertson’s group lay in the witnesses. According to the scientists present, amateur spectators and photographers had committed wholesale misidentification of bright planets, stars, meteors, mirages, atmospheric temperature inversion and lenticular clouds. The remaining misperceptions included clumsy amateur interpretations of conventional aircraft, weather balloons, birds, searchlights, and even kites, among other standard phenomena. As the CIA had stipulated, no faint glimmer was created for a viable identification or declaration of purpose of those entities seen over America’s prairies, deserts, or cities.

Although separate panel members held differing degrees of belief in the extraterrestrial question, whether spoken or not, the collective report definitively quashed the notion. According to the signed document, there was “no evidence that related to objects sighted to space travelers”[32] as they are so mobile and unreachable. This has been deemed a flat-footed and overly obvious response. Ruling that a phenomenon must not be true because the investigator is incapable of apprehending it betrayed the agency’s lack of interest in an open agenda. Outside of Fournet’s conditional acceptance of the belief that there might be UFOs of an extraterrestrial nature, some of the members confided that unexplained objects at high altitude traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of U.S. installations remained an open question. To rest one’s case on such a view would not have provided the necessary relief for President Truman and his administration, nor would it satisfy the CIA’s agenda that the whole affair be debunked and discarded.

The movies viewed on the first day from Tremonton and Great Falls were dismissed in short order. The reasoning behind the rejection related to a semi-spherical object’s ability to produce a reflection of sunlight without “blinking”[33] through a 60-degree arc of travel. No specific data was presented on either birds or polyethylene weather balloons, but seagulls remained as the central culprits in the Newhouse film due to their ability to reflect in high sunlight. Objects seen as “circular bluish-white”[34] would, according to the panel, be expected to reflect convex surfaces when reflection obscures the rest of the object. The Montana film merited little response at all, as the obvious error was a misinterpretation of jet aircraft exhibiting bright reflection. No one was summoned bearing any knowledge of whether jet aircraft were present in that locale, date, and time.

As part of the body of study, the final report listed all the sightings that were under review. These included occurrences at Bellefontaine, Ohio; Tremonton, Utah; Great Falls, Montana; Yaak, Montana; the general Washington, D.

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